Description
Book SynopsisAlexander’s A History of Old English Literature is an outstanding introduction to a difficult period of literary history. It provides a simple historical and cultural context for the study of the Anglo-Saxons, and offers a history, illustrated by many passages in translation, of the whole of the literature that survives. While it contains solid, insightful and sensible criticism of individual literary works, its overall historical organization suggests that Old English literature was created in a cultural context that changed from one century to another. Although its intentions are scholarly, this history of Old English literature is also an introduction, assuming little knowledge of this period or its surviving products, and none of its language. This edition has been revised and rewritten throughout, and offers a new preface as well as an updated bibliography.
Trade Review“Old English literature has long been the preserve of scholars and specialists. Michael Alexander’s A History of Old English Literature now fills a major gap by introducing both prose and poetry, literature and history, in an accessible style which communicates his own lifelong love of the subject. Especially attractive are the translations, at once accurate and colloquial, which disperse the antiquarian miasma hanging round the subject while keeping the vital touch of strangeness. Alexander’s book is now the best and most complete one-volume guide to the whole of Old English, oldest and best-recorded of the vernaculars of Dark Age Europe.” — Tom Shippey, St. Louis University
“A lucid, eminently readable survey, altogether a cosy hearth-companion.” — Margaret Connolly, University College Cork
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements
Preface
Chronological Table
1. PERSPECTIVES
- What has Survived
Songs and Scribes
The End of Heathenism
The Languages of Britain
Contexts
2. ENGLAND 449-1066: A SKETCH
- Old English
Conquest
Conversion
Sutton Hoo and warrior society
Conversion and accommodation
Bede’s Northumbria
Theodore and a learned Church
Wessex
The Benedictine Revival
3. HEROIC POETRY INCLUDING BEOWULF
- The heroic ethos
Germanic heroic poetry
Versification
Poetic diction
Formulaic composition
The uses of poetry
Beowulf
4. THE WORLD’S WONDER: RIDDLES
5. BEDE AND CÆDMON
- The Ecclesiastical History
Cædmon
6. THE POETIC ELEGIES
-
Wanderer and Seafarer
Other Elegies
7. ALFRED AND OLD ENGLISH PROSE
-
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
Books most needful
8. VERSE OF THE CHRISTIAN ESTABLISHMENT
- Saints’ lives: Andreas
Elene
Christ
The Dream of the Rood
9. THE BENEDICTINE REVIVAL
- Aelfric’s Colloquy
Aelfric’s Homilies
Wulfstan
Verse of the tenth century
The Battle of Maldon
10. AFTERWARDS
Appendix: A Note on Deor
Notes on the Plates
Bibliography and Further Reading
